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The Real-Life Diet of a Yoga Bro

Professional athletes don’t get to the top by accident. It takes superhuman levels of time, dedication, and focus—and that includes paying attention to what they put in their bellies. In this series, GQ takes a look at what athletes in different sports eat on a daily basis to perform at their best. Here’s a look at the daily diet of Jacob Manning, Instagram yoga star.

“Before I got into my yoga practice I did heroin and cocaine,” says yoga teacher Jacob Manning. “I was homeless in San Francisco in the Tenderloin district, I lived in homeless shelters back to back to back, I even spent a little time in jail charged with a felony that was later expunged. That was basically my life.”

If this doesn’t mesh with your impression of yoga teachers as zenned out moms or Portlandia extras, you may need to reconsider the kind of people who are actually drawn to something that takes so much dedication. “People don’t go to yoga on a winning streak,” says the 25-year-old Manning. “You don’t seek out a spiritual life unless you’ve kinda gone through hell.”

Manning actually had his first yoga class at 19, at a treatment center, but despite feeling a draw, he still struggled with yoga’s less-than-masculine reputation, and it took an aunt dragging him to more classes later for him to fully embraced it. “I lifted weights most of my life, mostly out of fear of what people thought about me and to compensate for things about myself that I didn’t like. The yoga practice opened that up to where that’s not the most important thing.”

Yoga is one of those things that you never really master—there are always new poses, variations on old ones, dealing with those old poses as your body ages—but there’s still a point you get to where you realize, “Oh, shit, I can do this.” For Manning that was finally mastering the press handstand, a tricky pose where you move from a seated position to a full handstand without using your legs for support. “It took me nine months of dedicating all of my time, outside of working at Taco Bell, to doing the press handstand—staying hours after class, practicing in my room before sleep. But then once I mastered that it was more, ‘Well, what’s the next thing?’”

Now an instructor in Southern California, Manning started using Instagram as a yoga journal to chart his progress and improve poses (it’s surprisingly hard to know what your body’s doing when you can’t see yourself). But it’s also a way for people to follow as he improves and keeps trying out whatever the next thing is. “It lets me see where I’m at at that time in my life, the physical transformation, what I was going through, and using that as a reflection to see my growth and progress and to be as authentic as I can. I’ve been really fortunate with how people respond.”

To stay photo-ready, Manning, who’s tried everything from vegan to meats-only, sticks to a protein-heavy diet, aiming for one gram per pound of target weight. His largest meal of the day is dinner, and he’s got a natural edge for staying fit in that he, like Fabio, hates sweets. He supplements yoga with snowboarding weekly with his girlfriend, surfing daily in the spring and summer, and the sporadic 7-10 mile jog with pull-ups and dips when running through parks. “Doing yoga, sometimes it’s hard to get your body sore and dig deep into the muscle tissues,” he adds. We have a hard time relating to that.